Getting your first book published is notoriously difficult, but North writer Penny Sumner had three major publishing houses fighting over her debut novel, Tree of Angels.

Much of the credit for that is due to a Russian countess, she tells Pauline Holt.

**********

Sitting in the Australian sunshine in the 1970s, flicking through the literary magazine Stand, a teenage Penny Sumner used to dream about an exotic place called Newcastle.

That distant city seemed to her to be a cultural haven. Stand, set up by the late Jon Silkin, was based in Newcastle for 34 years and Penny, then an English undergraduate in Brisbane, Queensland, was one of its biggest fans.

Three decades later she is living and working in the city she used to dream about and has just had her novel, Tree of Angels, published . . . a work which began life as a short story for Stand.

It's a sweeping historical saga about Nina, a young girl brought up in pre- revolution Russia who marries an Englishman and moves to Britain.

There is a shadow over their relationship, though, and it turns out to have tragic consequences.

Tree of Angels follows the fortunes of Nina's family over the next 80 years, through two world wars and across Russia, England and Australia. Her agent sold the book in three days after a three-way auction contested by Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and Orion.

Orion won and is already billing Penny as a rival to acclaimed Hartlepool-based historical novelist Philippa Gregory and saga specialist Sally Beauman.

Penny is still taken aback by the speed at which her book was snapped up.

She says: "It was a Friday when my agent talked to me and said, `I love your book but I can't promise anything because the market is so difficult at the moment,' so I had a contingency plan. I was very aware that my son, Benet, had been very involved with my writing.

"I didn't want him to see all this work come to nothing and his mum weeping in the corner, so I said I would have it printed on beautiful paper and professionally bound and it would go on the shelf for Benet when he grew up, and I would get on with my next book."

The novel was sent to publishers on the Monday and by the Thursday she had her first bid.

"It was immensely lucky," says Penny modestly. "It has to be the right sort of thing for the zeitgeist and I think I was lucky that this is the sort of novel they are looking for at the moment."

That was more good fortune than good judgment, however, as she wrote Tree of Angels with the aim of pleasing no one but herself, she says.

As course leader for Northumbria University's master's degree in creative writing, she wasn't entirely in the dark about what publishers are after, though.

"After I'd started the book, we had an agent in to talk to the students and she said that big novels, historical novels, were doing very well. It just happened to be that that was exactly what I was writing.

"A lot of it is about whether you are writing the right sort of thing at the right time and it's very difficult to predict."

That might sound like plain sailing, but Tree of Angels took Penny about five years to complete.

She had to fit in her writing around her teaching work and looking after Benet, who was only seven when she started it.

"To begin with I was getting up at 5am and writing for an hour and a half, but suddenly I remembered my old laptop, so in the end I would follow him around the house with that," Penny recalls.

She would tap away at her computer while Benet enjoyed a kids' video sitting next to her.

Despite his youth Benet also took on a quality-control role throughout the creative process. Penny would read chunks of the novel, though not the rude bits, to him and he would offer his opinions.

"I was talking to him about one of the characters on the way to school one day and he said, `Mum, I think this character lacks psychological depth,' and he was right!"

Penny also had the support of her partner Philip Plowden, associate dean of law at Northumbria University, and her mum Audrey.

Her mother lives with the family in Jesmond, Newcastle, and is still sprightly enough at the age of 90 to help take care of Benet.

The starting point for Penny's book came from a tale once told to her by a Russian countess. Penny had come over to England in her early 20s from Australia after winning a Commonwealth scholarship to St Anne's College at Oxford.

"When I was a student I sometimes used to attend the Russian Orthodox Church," she explains.

An Australian friend was a convert and although Penny was not very religious she agreed to go along.

"It was a branch of the free church in exile and was largely made up of some very, very elderly people who had escaped after the revolution," she said.

Among them was a countess, Olga Bobrinskaya, also known as Nelly, and she always had a story to tell.

"Nelly was wonderful," says Penny. "She was born in 1899 and when I met her she was very elderly. She'd been brought up on a huge estate in the Caucasus and had a very nice life as a young woman.

"Along came the revolution and the family was in great danger. They fled. She finished up working as a translator for the British Army and was also nurse to a British surgeon.

"She was involved in operations on soldiers and in those days they used cocaine, which apparently makes you feel as if you can do anything.

"The surgeon had enough, not for the soldiers but for the nurses. He gave them cocaine to give them the strength to hold these men down because they had the operations without any anaesthetic."

In Tree of Angels Nina is a nurse so squeamish she can only assist in operations after taking the drug.

"It was that one little story that made me start thinking about what it would have been like to have been a very young girl before the revolution.

"What I am really interested in is how events in our ancestors' lives really shape us, even if we don't know the stories. With Nina, terrible things happen in her life, really big events, and they shape the next generation and the next, even though those descendants don't know it."

Another theme in the novel is that of emigration.

"My parents were British emigrants to Australia and then came back, so I'm interested in that," says Penny.

"They went out after the Second World War. They followed my uncle, who had gone out before the war.

"My father was a musician and as a very young man he was working in an orchestra in London, but it was put out of business by the talking movies."

In Australia he became an estate agent and Penny was raised on the Gold Coast in Queensland. It was an idyllic upbringing, she says, and she even had a student job as a photographer at a dolphin pool.

"The blurb said, `Our dolphin never misses and neither does the photographer.' The dolphin would get a clap and I would get a clap as well," she said.

Penny was doing post-doctoral research at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth when she saw an advertisement for her current job in Newcastle, teaching contemporary literature.

"I knew Newcastle was a good place for writers," she said.

A few years later she set up Northumbria University's MA in creative writing, a course now boasting 60 students.

Its students don't have to have done a degree beforehand, so it attracts people from lots of different backgrounds."We have students from around the world, American students, a missionary from Nigeria.But can you really teach people how to be writers I ask. Obviously they have to have a latent talent she says but adds:"Doing a degree gives people permission and the space in their lives. Quite often it enables them to say to family, `Look, I'm serious about this.' It also gives people feedback on their writing."

Penny has already embarked on her second book for Orion. It is partly set in Newcastle and is about the city's maritime past.

Its heroine travels from Australia to England on a coal-burning steamship, so, as part of her research, Penny has become a regular at the city's Discovery Museum.

"I go down there clutching my map of the world," says Penny. "One of the things I like about novels like this is it allows other people to weave their stories in."

Penny believes there is a growing trend in reading for rollicking good stories sparked by the success of children's authors also popular with adults such as J K Rowling and Phillip Pullman.

"I think you need a really strong story if you're going to have big themes, so what I've been trying to do is tell a really good story and hopefully it will be the sort of thing reading groups will like."

* If you'd like to meet Penny and discuss her book, she will be a guest at a reading group at the Paper Treasures bookshop in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, on Thursday, August 12.